


Age of Extinction

by Kit_SummerIsle



Category: Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Distopia, Extinction, Gen, tomb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-02
Updated: 2014-10-02
Packaged: 2018-02-19 15:33:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2393615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kit_SummerIsle/pseuds/Kit_SummerIsle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The great war ends and what now? Will Primus give one more chance to his creations?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Age of Extinction

**Author's Note:**

> Umm, first of all, the fic has nothing to do with the Bay movie with the same title. Absolutely nothing. If anything it's G1/TF:P-ish. 
> 
> serious warning: don't read it if depressed. It is depressing enough.

A lone figure stood on the rugged hilltop. Around him the burned, melted and solidified metal of the mountains crumpled up in great, tortured waves, long-dead, broken crystal shards embedded into it, breaking the weak light into tiny rainbows in a pretty, but useless display. The flier balanced on a blackened outcrop barely large enough to give a stable place for both his thrusters. The ground trembled from time to time with the inner convulsions of the dying planet, causing dust-smeared white wings to flutter with an effort to keep his balance. The Seeker didn’t take conscious notice of the movement, neither of the planet’s crust, nor his own wings – he was staring downwards to the plains that lay at the foot the former mountains, red optics dimmed with emotions.

Heaving vents gave indication of his inner turmoil, slight tightening of clawed servos, white wings flexing occasionally, independently from the balancing act… the figure might have stood unmoving on his perch, among the roiling smoke and dust, but he was far from peaceful and calm. Burning red optics swept over the plains, stopping sometimes, dimming or brightening as memories came forth and went like windblown leaves – and his relentless gaze scoured the sight on and on… no matter the pain it gave.

For the plains he stared so troubled at held so much… so many memories, so many ruins, so many mechs it might be rightfully called a huge tomb. A memorial for a race. Burial grounds for his frame-kin. For there were only a few like him any more and no hope for more. War destroyed them and all their hopes of equality, freedom… and even of simple future. Survivors made peace far-far too late and now toiled away their pitiful existences in and among ruins, barely able to make a scratch on the destruction themselves had wrought…

Starscream saw no point in trying to clear up the war-torn, melted, burned, irradiated rubble. It went down to layers hundreds of hics deep in places and underneath it was the same tortured, dead metal of the planet. Clearing it away from one place just meant larger heaps of wasteland in others. He told them to melt it all into a stable surface and build over whatever dwelling they needed. But now… Autobots always insisted on impractical ideals when it was a matter of survival. Did they have energon to waste on useless toil? Of course not. Did they have mechs enough for unproductive toil? No, no and no. There were less than two hundred of them on Cybertron and that already included returned neutrals as well. 

The Seeker’s wings drooped as his optics stared at the ruins in front of him, vents giving a sad sigh. The uneven, lumpy ground of the plains appeared almost serene for an unaware observer – if not for the broken fingers of metal that dotted the rolling hills. They might even look broken trunks of immense trees – for Starscream, who’s seen organic planets with their organic forests – if not for the sheer size of them. Even from his high vantage point, they looked huge in their ruined glory, the distance doing very little to rob them of their robust solidity. Uneven in height, their jagged rims like broken denta, the immense remains of the former towers and aeries, the solid foundations for the sky-high structures that looked so slim and graceful while whole… were now only broken stumps.

Each ruin, each barely recognizable lump, each broken digit that never touched the sky was a memory. Starscream’s processor retained the ancient map of the city and he could identify most of the unrecognizable lumps, put a clan-designation to all of the long-gone aeries, recall the shape of the towers he had known so well… the small hillock closest to him, with the twisted metal girders on it that looked like knots of cables from the distance… it was the main communications tower, the hub that connected Vos to the rest of Cybertron, allowing the grounders’ words – but not them in the metal – into the proud, isolationist city. 

The big lump, near the center, a rare one without towers was the Academy. He got his first degrees in there, among his kin, earning him the description ‘prodigy’ the first time. He met his Trine there… vents hiccupped and optics dimmed and Starscream forced his processor away from that thought. That wound was still raw. Sharp claws pricked metallic palms, the pinpoints of pain drawing his gaze away from the hurting memory. Though every tower, every ruin, every lump on the ground carried memories, some were still fresher than others. 

His optics sought out one particular tower, what was left of it… there, to the south of the Academy and by one of the rare ground-level thoroughfares, a wide-based octagonal tower that was almost destroyed till the ground… his clan’s tower, where he was born, where he grew up and where he hardly spent any time after getting his last frame. They were all buried in the rubble that covered the remaining foundations, the uneven mound of molten metal that embraced the tower’s remaining walls. None of them survived Vos, perhaps none of them would have wanted to. Starscream never before returned to their eternal tomb. 

How could the grounders do this? How could they clear up rabble, knowing that the twisted metal pieces they threw onto the lorry’s flatbed to take to the dumps might have been somemech’s limbs? Or helm, or processor, or… Primus forbid, how could they handle a spark-chamber like it was rubbish? Starscream shook all over, wings clattering. To disturb the eternal rest of their fallen mechs, desecrate their frames, demolish their tombs? Spindly claws spread over the landscape like he wanted to protect the ruined city, the memento of the early orns of the war, when there were scores of mecha to destroy in a single airstrike, when there were still millions who now slept forever under the rubble…

Starscream saw an excavation early in the war, an important laboratory being unearthed from under the melted slag… and he saw mechs in the rictus of deactivation, who lived after the building was felled around them, who survived, for however little the destruction just to slowly die under tons of rubble, buried deep under the very building that had been their protection… and what failed to eventually protect them. The Seeker in him screamed then – they were grounders, but not even grounders can avoid claustrophobia when buried under tons of rubble with no hope of rescue, dying slowly in darkness, in suffocating heat, starve slowly or be compressed into unrecognizable slag by the slowly shifting rubble…

He’d never want to see something like that again. Let the deactivated lie in their tombs. Let the ruins stand as memento for their existence. They wrecked a planet and it was now a huge tomb floating in space, carrying its warning for all other races: Beware! War destroys. Eternal war destroys everything… and it is possible for a race to exterminate itself. The grounders’ hope is futile, the Seeker knows. There aren’t any sparklings, but every vorn a few mechs deactivate, from natural causes, from accidents… they are far below the line the race could survive anyhow. The scientist in the Seeker knows this with no margin of error. They are as good as dead. They might live far longer than many organic races, but they won’t exist forever and with no new generations it is a futile existence.

The remains of a slender tower, one of the latter ones to be built catches the red gaze. It barely had any time to acquire the sheen metal gets when exposed to the acidic atmosphere before destruction claimed it. The strong construction survived even the fall and the enormous pipe of its slender body now lies broken but recognizable on one side. Metal melted and run on some part of it, giving it a strangely organic, lumpy shape, but other parts retained even some carved glyphs on the surface. The Seeker didn’t need the glyphs to know what was it.

His aerie. 

Barely built before Vos died, home for them for less than a vorn, never filled with his own clan members, Starscream barely even remembered what it looked like in the inside. He was away from it so much, his studies, his trips, his pride keeping him everywhere but there, not yet ready to settle down and make it a real Seeker Aerie… but it still hurt to see it fallen, broken, devoid of light and life. It wasn’t a tomb as far as Starscream knew – they were all away when the attack came and so the ruins only held memories and trinkets, but no broken frames. Small relief. Very small in retrospect. His mates perished far away from here, on a foreign planet, for nothing but an empty war’s end…

The huge arch of the broken dome of the city hall dominats the landscape around it – when it had fallen, the immense structure smashed everything around and underneath it. The crystal panels of the soaring dome were long gone of course, not even a twinkle remained in the blind holes where they used to sit and cast multicoloured light on the frames moving about under them. As a youngling, Starscream, like so many Seekers before him were crawling, running and flying around in the great halls, chasing the coloured lights on the mirror bright floor in gleeful happyness… now only silence echoed in the remains of the dome and darkness sat in the buried corners.

No younglings. No Seekerlings. No future.

It jagged into the scarred, cynical spark of the Seeker, tore a wail from a rasping, hurting vocalizer. Not that he’d wanted sparklings, not after his Trine was gone, not like he would be a good creator… but still. Too late to end the war, too late to save their chances, the last chances, then the ones after that… Primus was giving them so many and they wasted them all. Now they stood on what remained of their planet – a dead wasteland with noxious fumes for an atmosphere and ruined tombs for cities -, made peace at last… and they had to swallow the bitter pill of being far too late.

No Matrix, no Vector Sigma, No Keys and no sparklings. No Primes and no Primus. 

They were alone, abandoned and doomed. They were dead, just not recognizing it yet. The grounders went through the motions, made plans and put them through, they prayed and hoped… something. A miracle. But Starscream knew in the depth of his embittered spark that they wasted too many miracles and there was noone to give them any more. It might take gigavorns for every survivor to succumb the ravages of time – or it might take an orn if their numerous enemies in the multiverse realized their vulnerability. But in the end it wouldn’t matter… and Starscream, for one would have preferred to go in a blaze of glory, not to fade into insignificance. Not that he had a choice in it.

Heat still rose from some places, dangerous heat, the smoky air trembling above them with unknown particles. The Seeker knew weapons intimately, he had designed some of the mightiest used by any mech on any sides – but he instinctly avoided the places where those terrible particle bombs fell. The last mass-destruction weapons used by the Senate, designed by scientists deserving a million deaths and where they fell, the melted rubble was still smoldering, after untold millions of vorns and would glow with its dangerous particles for eons after Cybertron itself cooled to a dead husk.

There was an aerial training ground there, gone when the bomb fell, melted into so many droplets of molten, metallic rain in a nanoklik, along with the frames of the Seekers competing amongst its twists and turns… nothing remained there to indicate its structure, not even a mound like in other places… there, it was a still metallic lake, its surface forever frozen into the waves of a scorching wind long gone, slick and dark and keeping its secrets. Underneath, the metal was still molten, structures, frames, wings mixed together in a lava-lake that would never cool, a queer tomb for those who couldn’t rest there even in death…

Unlike Earth, the place never had plants growing over and hiding the destruction, healing the wounds of the planet and remembering the fallen with flowers. It was as stark as when it had fallen, only the acid rains softening the edges, the windblown ash and trash abrading the mirror-bright surfaces – but no growth hid it from sight. Crystals were gone before mechs in the increasingly hostile enviroment, the few mechanimals as well; the spindly growths of metallic plants barely evolved before war rolled over their first tendrils, destroying their future as well. Starscream remembered… how he, too scoffed at a young scientist bringing the news of metallic plants evolving in cracks of the canyons… it meant nothing in the face of the energon crisis and growing unrest, those primitive plants had no chance at all before war destroyed them along with everything else. 

Starscream sighed deeply, the air hissing out of his vents, dislodging the smoke settling into them. It was all hopeless. It was all useless standing here and staring at a place that would never again be his home. Neither Vos, nor Cybertron. But he didn’t try to convince the grounders of it. No use colonizing another planet if they had no future. The remains of a civilization, once the greatest in the universe… now a few hundred broken mechs toiling pointlessly among the ruins of their planet, scratching the tombs of their race and delude themselves into believing a future. 

There were no great mechs among them curiously. Starscream often wondered how it happened that all the leaders were gone, only he survived… he could have claimed the rule, could have been a leader like he’d always wanted… but seeing the pitiful few who remained, his spark trembled. Was it worth to be the absolute ruler of a mere servoful? Was it his fate perhaps to lead their race into the inevitable extinction? If so, he had failed in that; he couldn’t take the chance to claim leadership among the grounders. Instead, he remained aloof and alone, a lone flier among the groundbound, forever different in ways more than one.

He went wherever he wanted to, he took energon when he needed to, he pursued his own goals until they dried up in uselessness… and none of them tried to reproach him. There was no fight in them either, no fire left across the swath of destruction taking away all the leaders, all those who could dream a vision and inspire hope. They were busy little ants, working because that was the only structure remaining in their lives. Starscream flew and floated and searched, but he found no more hope than the others among the ruins. 

Coming to Vos was his last act, something he still had to do. A strange premonition perhaps, telling him no details, just insisting that he saw the city of his frame-kin for the last time, bringing him here to stare among the smoke to see what he still could. The Seeker’s spark felt heavy with sadness and futility, some queer feeling of finality too. Tearing his glance from the tomb of his kin he looked upwards where a lone ray of light broke through the dark fumes. It danced on him for kliks, warming cold limbs and blinding staring optics.

Was it hope?

Nah. Just a sunbeam.


End file.
